In advance of tonight's GOP debate at the Reagan Library many liberal pundits are trotting out one of their favorite irrelevant chestnuts, namely that Saint Reagan wouldn't have passed muster according to the standards of today's Crazytown GOP. It doesn't matter how many times the Right yawns in indifference to these airtight and often rather smug demonstrations of their presumably ill-informed devotions, the pundits still so sternly so earnestly keep hammering away at the point, hoping this time it will make a dint.
What those of us who make the point and keep expecting it to resonate are failing to grasp is that Reagan fervently hated taxes and government -- or at any rate endlessly railed about them in public places -- and everybody knows it -- even if occasionally he raised taxes and expanded government.
Republicans could care less about such "hypocrisy" any more than they care that their pet Christian Talibanists indulge in so many of the sins they also rail against, from rampaging greed to buggering boys. That sinners sin is less important than that they hate sin. Even when they get caught sinning egregiously they can be forgiven and still succeed spectacularly in their virtue if they play the aftermath of the exposure of their sin with sufficiently histrionic abjection.
You know, I suspect it really cracks Republicans up to see how Democrats tie themselves up in knots over apparent hypocrisies -- as when Republicans charge Democrats with racism for noticing some racist crap a Republican said and then Democrats roll up into tight little paralyzed balls of hysterical self examination rather than letting that nonsense roll right off their backs.
Reagan changed the direction of the country, he resurrected the Movement Republican momentum stalled by Watergate, he looted infrastructure, dismantled democracy, derided public service, and not by mobilizing the Nixonian politics of resentment, but all with a smile on his face and a patriotic song in his heart. And even if he was reluctantly forced to concede some reality as he tangled with big bad liberals, his eyes were on the same prize the Tea Party fancies they spy on the same horizon, only closer, oh so much closer, now.
Crazytown cares less what Reagan did than what they imagine he would do now given the changed circumstances he himself set in motion. What liberals declare to be his distance from far right orthodoxy movement conservatives see as the distance they have traveled in no small part in consequence of his accomplishment.
Ronald Reagan was an asshole, and it's high time liberals stopped trying quixotically to score cleverness points by declaring him a better asshole than the assholes the Republicans are now. Democrats need to be making a clear and positive case for democracy and good government on a daily basis. Let the assholes have their asshole and move on for heaven's sake.
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